By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

SUMMARYThis book is a direct result of the Workshop on On-line Methods in Children'sLanguage Processing, held at the Graduate Centre of the City University of NewYork in 2006. It aims to introduce the reader to a variety of techniques whichare currently emerging in the field of developmental psycholinguistics. Theemphasis is on tapping into language processing in real time. The bookrepresents the change of focus occurring in the study of language developmentfrom a mainly offline assessment of children's competence to the onlineinvestigation of the interaction between competence and performance factors.

The book is divided into six chapters, based around different methods. Eachchapter follows a similar format. The different methods are first introducedthen assessed in terms of viability in adapting the techniques to theinvestigation of child language. Finally principal research findings are given,in the form of a review of each team's research program. The methods includedare event-related brain potentials (ERP), eye tracking, looking-while-listeningand reaction time techniques.

Chapter 1 (Harald Clahsen) is devoted to behavioral methods. Several behavioraltasks including word monitoring, probe recognition, and speeded grammaticalityjudgment are reviewed. The remaining tasks (self paced reading and self pacedlistening, cross-modal priming and syntactic priming, and speeded production)are described in more detail, based around investigations undertaken by theresearch team. The sections on methodological issues are balanced, detailing theadvantages of such methods and the complexities and difficulties in adaptingsuch techniques to children. The discussion of methodology is based around fourcriteria. The first regards the time sensitivity of the measure, the secondconcerns the naturalness or artificiality of the task. The remaining criteriadeal with practicalities of design and execution. First is the task childappropriate, or too challenging, and finally is the equipment transportable andeasy to set up for use with children who may not be able to attend thelaboratory. The final section justifies the use of these techniques against thenewly emerging physiological measures, suggesting that behavioral tasks may beused to provide converging evidence, supplementing other methodologies. Thechapter concludes with a brief discussion of the advantages of this approach.

Chapter 2 (Claudia Mannel and Angela D. Friederici) provides a detailedintroduction to event-related brain potentials (ERP). The chapter assumes littleknowledge on the part of the reader and comprehensively introduces the mainconcepts of this technique as it applies to adults, before candidly discussingthe real difficulties facing developmental researchers. Such problems includethe shorter attention span of infants, the necessity of keeping still duringexperimentation, and limited number of trials. This is explored further in theilluminating appendix to this chapter where the authors explain in detail theirprocedures to overcome these problems. The remainder of this chapter reviews anumber of studies, revealing the development of most areas of language includingprocessing of phonological and prosodic, lexical-semantic and syntacticinformation. Taken together these studies provide valuable information about thedevelopment of receptive processing in the first three years of life. Thechapter ends with an extremely clear summary, drawing together the many threadsdiscussed in this complex chapter.

Chapters 3 and 4 both use eye tracking techniques, but vary in the experimentaldesign and necessary equipment. In Chapter 3, John C. Trueswell reviews the useof eye tracking in the investigation of language. He first describes threemethods of recording eye movements (head mounted and remote eye trackingsystems, and the ''poor man's eye tracker'') discussing the advantages anddisadvantages of each. As with ERP, this technique requires some adaptation tobe used successfully with children, especially in terms of the time taken tocalibrate the systems. The second part of the chapter makes explicit severalassumptions of this method, which allow eye movements to be linked to syntacticparsing. Using discussion illustrated by data examples the theoretical base ofthe assumptions are argued to be valid. The chapter concludes that eye trackingis a valuable technique but cautions the researcher to continually bear in mindthat developmental changes in attentional control and cognitive control caninteract with the observations from the method, although this is true of allinvestigations into development.

Chapter 4 (Anne Fernald, Renate Zangl, Ana Luz Portillo, Virginia A. Marchman)describes a particular paradigm, looking-while-listening, in considerable depth.A brief historical review provides the context for the emergence of thistechnique, and a rationale for its use. This is followed by a break-down of themethod including choice of participants, preparation of stimuli, construction oftasks, apparatus, testing procedure, coding procedure and reliability, and datacleaning. The final section discusses interpretation of the resulting data anddescribes procedures, such as onset-contingent plots, profile plots and measuresof professing efficiency, which have been developed by the research team. Thisfairly abstract discussion is firmly grounded throughout by examples of datagleaned from previous investigations. Although this methodology sharessimilarities with preferential looking, due to the frame by frame analysis ofthe video data it provides high-resolution real time measures of speechprocessing. Naturally this invokes a considerable increase in time and effortduring the coding procedure but the detailed analysis which this allows morethan provides compensation.

Chapter 5 (Jesse Snedeker and Malathi Thothathiri) departs somewhat from theformat of the rest of the book as it aligns more with a research paper than areview of a particular methodology. A brief review of syntactic development isprovided followed by a detailed discussion of the methodology used toinvestigate early syntactic development. This methodology combines syntacticpriming with eye tracking. The chapter then reports preliminary findings of thisinvestigation with three and four year olds and discusses the implications ofthese findings and future directions for this line of research.

Chapter 6 (Helen Smith Cairns) concludes the book. A brief history of the studyof language development opens this engagingly written chapter. It covers majorareas of research since the late 1950's and culminates with the workshop ononline methods which forms the backbone of this book. The opportunity is takento discuss more papers which were presented at this workshop but which were notincluded in the book. The chapter concludes with a hopeful look to the future.This chapter is firmly set within the Chomskyan tradition and makes no mentionof alternative theories.

EVALUATIONAs a collection of techniques to tap into online processing, this book makes areal contribution. It is a valuable snapshot of an increasingly prominent methodof investigating language processing. The individual chapters work well tointroduce the respective methodologies, especially in the specific problemsfacing developmental researchers interested in adapting such techniques tochildren. It will work as a reference book, as a resource for experimentaldesign, and as inspiration for increasingly complex investigations into languagedevelopment.

Although not specifically aimed at students several of the chapters provide goodintroductions to various physiological techniques, and the thoughtfuldiscussions on adapting these methods to children's needs will be beneficial toall researchers in the area. The overall feeling of the book is one ofexcitement at the possibilities that these relatively new techniques open up,and of assessing current limitations and successes. Although the editors claimthat the book will be of interest to speech and language therapists and earlychildhood educators I feel that it will appeal more to researchers as itscontent is theoretical rather than practical.

As a final note, the final chapter perhaps missed an opportunity by focusingexclusively on Chomskyan theory, as the developments in methodology so wellcaptured in this book are also of benefit to those who do not ascribe to thisview of language development.

ABOUT THE REVIEWERHannah Sowden is a PhD student and teaching assistant in the department of HumanCommunication Sciences at Sheffield University. Her research is focused on theearly development of language and gesture in children with autism.